Terrible day!  Mexico, god!  I swear Marquez was possessed by evil spirits!  He needs a limpia (traditional and ritual Mexican cleansing for the uninitiated), and I for one, would be more than happy to break eggs over his head and whip him with bunches of ruda (rue), though he’s not worth sacrificing a chicken for.

Davin is sick so I wandered the conference alone most of the day…I mustered up the courage to walk up to and talk to my first complete stranger however!  Davin has been doing the heavy lifting in that department because he actually likes talking to strangers, but I actually approached the swedish head of the international tenant union and engaged him in engaging conversation and it went over well, with me being half invited to a swedish reception later in the afternoon celebrating the returning of a stolen indigenous totem pole…the greatest threat to affable swedish-canadian relations for the past 10 years apparently! I didn’t go.  I almost repeated the experiment, high on my first success, with a guy on the street who looked exactly like Clark Kent, but proceeded to trip over a crack in the sidewalk and so quickly changed my mind.

So I also wandered downtown, here are some truly touristy photos but with artisitic merit I think though I might be delusional.

The above is from the financial district, as is the fountain below:

and the waterfront is lovely…ther are sea planes!  How cool are they?  I want to fly one…

And from the walk back in search of food…

And this very cool graffiti, I’m impressed, i though LA had a corner on the street art department…